NATIONAL COMMUNITY CHURCH July 17, 2011 The God Anthology: Beauty Heather Zempel If you had the ability to pray one prayer that you knew with 100% certainty God’s answer would be ‘yes’ to, what would it be? If you had the chance to offer up one request that you knew God would grant you, what would it be? If you’ve got your Bible with you today, turn over to Psalm 27 and we’ll start there. If you don’t have your Bible with you, it’ll be on the screen. Earlier this week, we were at our annual staff play and pray retreat and at that retreat, we pray and we play. That’s about all we do but we do both of those things very, very hard and there were a couple of moments where the staff together as a team prayed really, really hard for one another. And one of the questions that I found myself asking different staff members over the course of the week was if you could pray one prayer that you knew God would answer, what would it be? Throughout Scripture we see examples of this. We find that for Jacob it was to be blessed. For Solomon it was to have wisdom. For Hezekiah it was to have his life spared. For blind Bartemaus it was for sight. For the thief on the cross, it was that Jesus would remember him. Often, our prayers are focused on the maintenance of our comfort and convenience and well-being. But if you had one shot at it, one shot that you knew God would answer, what would you pray for? In Psalm 27:4, we see David’s answer to that question. It says: One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in his temple. To gaze on the beauty of the Lord. A couple of observations about this. Number one – If I had one prayer to pray and I knew God would answer it, I’m not sure that would have been it. Especially when you consider the circumstances that David is in here, because of the context clues and the rest of the passage, it appears that this was one of the Psalms that David wrote when he was running for his life, when Saul was hunting him down, he was hiding out in caves. In that moment, I would have probably wanted God to do something for me! ‘God, help me run faster than Saul.’ ‘God, help me hide well.’ ‘God, send an army for me.’ ‘God, just knock off Saul!’ Those are some of the things I think I might have prayed. I think I would have asked God to do something for me. But David asked for something much different. He doesn’t ask God for something that comes from his hand, he asks for coming that comes in his face and in his heart. He says I want to gaze on the Lord’s beauty. What is the value of that? Another observation is that we’ve been talking, in this ‘God Anthology’ series, the quote from A.W. Tozer, what comes to mind first when you think about God is the most important thing about you. What comes to mind first when I think about God, faithfulness, sovereignty, love, mercy, wrath, jealousy, all those things spring to my mind, but I don’t know that beauty would ever come to my mind first. But how might our lives be different if beauty was the first thing that came to our minds? How might we view the circumstances and situations in our lives differently if beauty was the first thing we thought about when we thought about God? How would our communities of faith live differently if beauty was one of the first things that came to our minds when we thought about God? Now, if we are going to focus on the beauty of God, then I think we have to wrestle with some of the difficult things that come with it, because like wrath or jealousy, beauty kind of has a dark side to it too. For instance, beauty can often be deceptive. Even Scripture tells us this, the idea that beauty is often skin deep is true. If we go all the way back to the beginning, it was beauty that triggered the fall. Eve saw something that looked desirable, she reached for it, and it was because of beauty that creation spiraled downward into chaos and disorder. So beauty can be deceptive. Beauty can also be subjective. It is often subject to our cultural and personal preferences and filters, the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So one of the questions I often wrestle with, because I believe in absolute truth, is there also such a thing as absolute beauty. To test this, I thought I’d bring in some things that I personally find beautiful. We’ll put these on the screen. This is Urquhart Castle in Scotland. Who would not want to live there? This next one is actually an audio clip, we’ll a couple seconds of it {music playing}. This is one of my favorite parts of one of my favorite pieces of music, Handel’s Messiah. Most people would probably identify that as beauty over, say, a Weird Al Yankovich thing. Here’s another thing I find beautiful. This is my grandmother, who just turned 94, my mom and my little three-and-ahalf year old niece. Look at that little smirk on her face! Let’s go to the next one. This one you might not find beautiful but this happens to be the last page of my Master’s thesis. I don’t really remember what is going on here but it has something to do with phosphorous losses on sugar cane fields and statistical analysis of that, so what’s beautiful about this is that there is beauty in science and mathematics. The elegance of an equation that can reduce a very complex problem to a simple solution. And it’s the last page of my thesis! Let’s go on, this is another one that I find incredibly beautiful. That is an image of beauty! We’ve got one more, Corky’s bar-b-que! If God is beauty, this will be in heaven! I don’t care what Leviticus tells us! I may have unintentionally segued into the next point that not only might beauty be deceptive, it might be subjective, it could also be perceived perhaps as meaningless. What’s the point? What does it matter? There is no functionality to it. Author John Ruskin said that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless. Peacocks and lilies, for instance. If beauty can be deceptive and beauty can be subjective and it can be meaningless, then how do we understand if we are told in Scripture that it is an attribute of God’s character? I think in response to ‘beauty can be deceptive’ God’s beauty leads us to truth because it draws us and attracts us to Him. In terms of it being subjective, I would say that God’s beauty is absolute because it is rooted in his character; it is rooted in the essence of who He is and it is unchanging and it transcends our cultural and our personal preferences. And to the idea that it is meaningless, I think there is a difference between functionality and meaning, that perhaps God’s beauty is meant to bring us meaning beyond functionality, that it is meant to be desired and enjoyed and delighted in. G.K. Chesterton argued this: The truth is that God is innately generous. Creation shows an extravagance of color, complexity and design that goes far beyond simple functional value. At this moment, high in the Italian Alps, a tiny white flower glistens in the sunlight. It has never been seen by the human eye in all of its seasons of bloom. It is not in the central part of the food chain. It was created by God in the hope that one day a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve might glance at it and be blessed by its beauty. I think we have to recognize that God’s beauty is not subject to our filters. Like his wrath, like his jealousy, we can’t hold God in judgment. We can’t put them on trial and decide whether or not it is beautiful. He is beauty because He is. It is part of his essence and character. His beauty stands on its own regardless of our own perceptions of it. Let’s just look through Scripture at some places. God is very, very concerned about aesthetics. We see this throughout Scripture. If you go all the way back to the beginning, God, with one word, spoke galaxies and planets into existence and cared about even the most minute orbit of an electron. When we get to the second book of Scripture, in the book of Exodus, after God spent two chapters describing the creation, in Exodus He spends 15 chapters describing the construction, design and decoration of the tabernacle. And it gets a little bit cumbersome to read because you read God telling Moses how to build. Then you read Moses telling the people of Israel what God told him about how they should build it. Then you read about how they built it. But for some reason, God saw fit to include all three of these conversations and activities in the book. And what we read in Exodus 35, it says: Then Moses said to the Israelites, “See, the LORD has chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, 31 and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills— 32 to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, 33 to cut and set stones, to work in wood and to engage in all kinds of artistic crafts. 34 And he has given both him and Oholiab son of Ahisamak, of the tribe of Dan, the ability to teach others. 35 He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as engravers, designers, embroiderers in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen, and weavers—all of them skilled workers and designers. 30 The first person ever in Scripture to be described as being filled with the Holy Spirit was an artist working on the tabernacle. God is concerned with the construction right down to the color of the yarn. An orthodox theologian by the name of Anthony Coniaris said: From Exodus to Revelation, worship in the Bible is clothed in gold, silver, precious stone, embroidery, robes of gorgeous fabric, bells and candles. God ordered beauty, even extravagant beauty in worship. Even while his people were still wandering in the desert and living in tents, in the scarcity of the wasteland, as the people of God were daily resting on God’s provision, on God’s faithfulness to reign down food from heavenly, they worshiped like they were royalty. I think we can fast forward all the way to the end of Scripture and see in the book of Revelation where the New Jerusalem, the new city, is described in stunning detail, as we see that there are foundations of the city made of gold and that the walls are adorned with all kinds of jewels, or topaz and amethyst and emeralds, that there are 12 gates with 12 pearls. God makes beautiful things. But it is more than just the aesthetics. I think there is a place where God’s beauty goes beyond the physical and into something much deeper, that it is rooted in his character and how his character is displayed in so many different facets and different ways. I think one of the reasons I’m a personal fan of contemporary and modern art is because it invites the viewer in to complete the sentences. It is just as much about the process as it is the finished product. When you understand something about the artist and their process, then what you see is more than just what you see. It goes deeper than that. I’ve got a piece of art to demonstrate this. This is called Synecdoche and it is on display in the East Wing in the National Gallery of Art right now. When you look at this, it doesn’t look like anything that exciting. Technically, any of us could do this piece. It is 422 tiles of varying shades of beiges and tans and neutral colors. It just doesn’t seem like that interesting of a piece of art. But when you find out that each one of those tiles represent the skin tone of one of the artist’s friends, family members, neighbors or fellow artists, it takes on a whole new meaning. This is one of my favorite pieces of art because it says something so powerful and so profound about community and unity and diversity and the beauty that we find when we all come together. Really, what this is is 422 portraits of people. But because it is just communicating one thing about the person, it says something far more profound than it would if there was an actual physical representation of each person. I think that in order to see the beauty of God, we have to go beyond just what’s on the surface. When you look at a piece of art like this, you have to go beyond what you see on the surface to get at the truth and the power behind what it is. See, God’s character and his beauty is found in the harmony and tension of all these attributes that we’ve been talking about. There are numerous words in the Old Testament and the New Testament that have to do with God’s beauty. Some of them are equated almost synonymously with the word goodness. There are other places in Scripture where God’s beauty can also be translated as his holiness or his majesty or his honor. There is one word that shows up about 78 times that we understand as beauty that can also be translated into the word strength. It is all these characteristics coming together in which we see God’s beauty. His beauty is found in the harmony and the balance of all of these characteristics working in operation with one another. I think we get into trouble when we zoom in to closely on one of his traits. When we zoom in too closely on wrath, we are going to get a distorted view of who God is. If we zoom in too much on love, we get a distorted view of who He is. I’ve got another piece of art that I want to use to illustrate this. One of my favorite painters is a guy by the name of Georges Seurat. As technology began to develop, as the Industrial Revolution took off, technology developed to a place where there were new ways of making very accurate physical representations of things. So you had things like x-ray and photography that emerged that were forcing painters to move to a different mode and method of how they did their art. That’s when we saw Monet and the Impressionists spring forward. So instead of creating things that were very accurate visual representations of physical beings, they used broad brush strokes and invited the viewer in to complete the sentences. Seurat took this even a step further and instead of using brush strokes, he just used dots, meticulously, over and over, just painted dots on a canvas. This is a close up of one of his most famous paintings. It is called Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It is hanging in the Chicago Art Institute. So when you look at it up close, there is not much beauty in this. It is just dots. It’s just a random collection of dots with no uniformity, no images springing from it. But with a different perspective, you see a different picture. If you take a few steps back, you see the painting it is total form. I think this is what God’s character is like. When we zoom in too closely, all we see is a mess of dots. But when we get the right perspective and we step far enough back and see the beauty that explodes on the canvas, there are colors that you see when you look at this painting that aren’t actually on the canvas itself because you eye optically mixes them. And there are forms and there are shapes that spring off of the canvas. If you get too close, all you see are dots. That’s how God’s character is. We have to understand his wrath and his love and his jealousy and his mercy in harmony in intention in balance in order and design with each other. When we see all those things together in their proper perspective, we see the beauty of God. God is beauty. We see his love for aesthetics and where He goes even deeper with beauty throughout Scripture. What are some things that God finds beautiful? We read in Isaiah 52 that God finds feet beautiful. It says: Beautiful are the feet that take the gospel. That verse is so important that it is reiterated in the book of Romans: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news. We are also told in Scripture that when the woman came and anointed Christ, the woman with the alabaster jar, it says: She has done a beautiful thing for me. In Acts 3 when the leper is healed, he is at the beautiful gate. Josephus, the Jewish historian, said that it was called the beautiful gate because it was made of bronze which made it more valuable than those made of silver and gold. I find it fascinating that God would meet the least valued member of society at the most valuable place in the city. In Ecclesiastes 3:11, we read: He makes all things beautiful in its time. It is interesting that the verses that precede that have to do with there is a time for love, there is a time for hate, there is time for war, there is a time for peace, there is a time for laughing, there is a time for weeping, then it culminates with this idea that He makes it all beautiful in its time. God will take the mess and work it into something beautiful. This story, if anything, is a story of messy stuff. This is a story of mess. If we go all the way back to the beginning, God created everything good, but it only took us three chapters to wreck it all. Adam and Eve fall, fingers get pointed, there is relational mess. Then we move to the next generation with Cain and Abel, I would say that jealousy and murder amounts to mess. Fast forward to Noah and Noah comes into a boat with a bunch of animals in order to save humanity and that’s a mess. Then this noble, heroic character of our faith gets drunk and disappoints his family. It’s a mess. We fast forward to Moses. I like to think of Moses as the first small group leader. He was leading people that were the biggest bunch of grumblers and complainers even after seeing God do miracles in their midst, they complained. Fast forward to David. David is running for his life and we read in I Samuel 22 that he is hanging out in a cave and as he is hiding there, first of all, his family comes to visit him, then it says he was joined by some other company. Scripture says that all of those who were in trouble and in debt and in discontentment met him there. Now, if I’m running for my life, those are not the people I want hanging out with me. It was a mess. We fast forward to the New Testament, Jesus comes, the Son of God, leaves his throne in heaven and He comes clothed in the skin of his own creation subjected to the care of his own creation, born in a feeding trough for animals. It is a mess. Then He gathers 12 guys around him, political revolutionaries, tax collectors, fishermen, really, really messy people and these are the guys that who are going to change the world. Then the church begins, and we like to think ‘O, if we could just get back to the point of the early church,’ but the early church was a wreck. Acts 15, we can’t even get 15 chapters into it and there is a mess and everybody has to converge in Jerusalem for the Council of Jerusalem to figure out how we’re going to navigate the mess. And then we see that most of the books in the New Testament are written to messes. Paul didn’t just have things he wanted to say and write people. He was usually addressing problems that were in the church. Let’s take Corinth, for example. In Corinth, they were dealing with incestuous affairs, sexual promiscuity, doctrinal in-fighting, big egos, idol worship, and people getting drunk off communion. Now, you know you have a mess in your church if people are getting drunk off communion! This is a story of messy, messy stuff. Yet, what we find in the midst of it is God’s fingerprint emerging, writing a story of hope and redemption and beauty in the midst of it. I wrestled with this a little bit. A few months ago, Ryan and I were in Rome and we were on a little bit of a study tour of the church history and I was standing in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and was just completely overwhelmed by the awe and the wonder of the art and the architecture and everything pointed me to God. Everything moved my heart to worship. And the more I studied church history, the more I thought maybe I need to be Catholic. I loved being in that place and my heart swelled within me and I felt like my heart was in my throat because I wanted to worship God because something about this place pointed me to the beauty of God. Then I remembered, because of my church history, that the construction of this place was facilitated in large part by the sale of indulgences. Then my stomach turned a little bit and then I didn’t know what to do! On one hand, I wanted to worship God and there is certainly nothing wrong with that; but the other side of me thought I needed to be discussed at the perversion of the gospel at that point in our history in the people of God. I didn’t know what to do. So as I stand in cathedral in conflict, all I know to do is to realize that it doesn’t have anything to do with us, this is all about God and his sovereignty and his faithfulness and his redemptive heart that is able to bring beauty out of mess; that even in our stupidity and inconsistencies and heresies and hypocrisies and inquisitions and crusades and all the stupid things we do today that we are not even aware of, that God is faithful to his story and God is faithful to his people and the beauty of our faith is that God is writing the story and redemption and hope and love emerge from the mess. God is beauty. He makes things beautiful. How do we respond to this? I think there are a couple of things. I think we were created to reflect beauty and I think we were created to enjoy beauty. Let me talk about reflecting beauty first. I think that it is important for us to recognize that we do not own God’s beauty. I think sometimes those of us who claim the name of Christ believe that we can define and characterize and draw the boundaries around what is beautiful for everybody else. I think sometimes we think that just because we claim the name of Christ that everything we create is beautiful and just because someone else does not claim the name of Christ that anything they create cannot be beautiful. We’ve got to recognize that we don’t own God’s beauty, we don’t control it, we don’t manipulate it, we don’t define it, we simple reflect it. In this, I want to talk to our artists. I love NCC because I believe this is a place where our artists can find their prophetic voice and their platform. I love what Diana is doing in gathering artists together and giving them a place to connect and giving them an opportunity to engage. If you got this when you came in and you are an artist or you think you are an artist or you were an artist at one point in your life, go! You need to be creating because it is a way that you reflect God’s beauty. And just because you are a follower of Christ, you do not have permission to be lazy in your art. If anything, you should pour more and more and more of yourself into it because it is an expression of worship and it is a reflection of divine beauty and there is a great weight of responsibility that goes along with that. To those of you who would not consider yourselves to be artists, you are not off the hook, because we were created in God’s image and part of that means that we were created with the capacity, the need, the drive, the ability to create. That doesn’t just show up on canvases or on sheets of music, it shows up in the way that we address situations and circumstances we find ourselves in. We are all called to be creative whether we are academics or entrepreneurs or athletes or students or parents, we are called to be innovative. It’s a way we reflect God’s beauty when we bring harmony and order and design to the world around us. Usually we find the opportunities to do that in the places where we face what appear to be unsolvable problems. That’s where God’s creativity springs up inside of us. What’s an area right now where you can reflect God’s creativity in a situation you face? Another way we reflect God’s beauty and cultivate it in our lives is by doing what Paul told Titus to do when he wrote to the young pastor. He said: Adorn the doctrine of God, our Savior in every respect. We reflect the beauty of God when we allow the deep things of God’s character to take root and grow in us, things like the fruit of the Spirit that we see in Galatians. Things like humility when Paul told the church in Philippi to have the same attitude that Christ had and to walk in humility with one another. It’s the kind of thing that we read in Colossians when we are told to clothe ourselves with compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience. It’s the thing Peter writes about when he says that we must have the beautiful quality of a gentle and quiet spirit. We reflect God’s beauty when we allow the character of Christ to be formed in us. I think it is fascinating to compare Western theology with Eastern theology. In the church in the West, we have understood the fall and redemption to be primarily about us incurring a debt that we couldn’t pay and Jesus restoring us to proper legal position before God. In Eastern orthodox, the understanding of fall and redemption is slightly different. The fall is understood to be a distortion and a perversion of God’s perfection and his perfect image and Jesus’ work on the cross is about restoring the divine image. So, in Western thought, it is about restoring a relationship and in Eastern thought, it is about restoring beauty and value in the divine image. I think they are both correct. That’s why, in Eastern orthodoxy, iconography is so important. To our Western minds, that may seem a little bit weird, especially to our Protestant minds, that seems real weird. But painters who would paint icons would spend weeks in spiritual preparation. They would pray. They would fast. They would study and meditate on the Scriptures because they believed that whatever they painted had to spring out of their personal spiritual discipline. And they believed that whatever they painted was the result of their relationship with Christ and they believed that the more beautiful they could paint it, the more we would be able to see and understand and appreciate the beauty of God. So icons weren’t primarily just about being used to help people grow closer to Christ, they were the result, the expression of someone who was desiring to grow closer to Christ and in that, restore beauty in a fallen world. We need to reflect the beauty of God. Secondly, we just need to enjoy the beauty of God. I think sometimes the things that we find to be more purposeless and meaningless may be the very thing that give the meaning and motivation to the things we do in our lives that we think are most meaningful. Maybe beauty is just meant to be enjoyed and delighted in. Maybe this week, we need to find some opportunities to just enjoy and delight in beauty. We need to get outside. We need to slow down and actually taste our food. Maybe we need to walk through an art gallery. Maybe we need to go to a baseball game. Maybe we need to enjoy the community of good friendship. Maybe we need to offer forgiveness. These are all expressions of beauty. They are ways we engage in it, ways we delight in it. It could mean slowing down long enough to enjoy God’s presence. Maybe prayer isn’t so much about asking God for stuff as it is just enjoying his presence. Maybe prayer is more about enjoying God than petitioning God. Maybe prayer is more about delighting in who He is as opposed to looking for handouts. Maybe spend some moments in prayer this week that are solely focused on enjoying God and who He is. I think part of enjoying beauty means that we enjoy the process and we enjoy the journey. I think for God, the process that we go through is just as important, if not more so, than the end result of who we become in our lives or where we end up. It is about the process. We may be in the middle of a mess in our lives right now. How are we engaging that process? Are we praying prayers that are asking God to deliver us from the mess or are we content to just see God’s beauty in the midst of it and trust that He can make beautiful things out of the messes of our lives? It is about enjoying the process. We were created to reflect God’s beauty and we were created to enjoy God’s beauty. Going all the way back to David, Psalm 27, he was in a mess, but he said the one thing he wanted, if he could pray one prayer that God would answer, it was that he could be in God’s presence all the days of his life and gaze upon his beauty. As we read further down in the passage, he says not only that, he says, ‘I will seek your face.’ He sought not his hand but his face. As we keep reading further down, in verse 13, he says, ‘I believe I will look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.’ God is beauty. His beauty is rooted in the harmony and the design and the order or all of his attributes in harmony with one another. We were created to reflect his beauty and to enjoy his beauty. When we pursue his face, we get that. And when we do that, we have the opportunity to see God in the land of the living, to see beauty in the land of chaos and mess. How unbelievably incredibly is it that God took a thing of horror and pain and agony, God took the cross and turned it into the most beautiful thing for us? The biggest mess of all, a Savior bloodied and broken hanging on a cross and God turned that into a beautiful moment where we are restored to relationship with Him, where we see the beauty of the divine image restored in a fallen world. If you’ve got mess in your life and you need to see the beauty of God, the first place you need to come to is the cross. That’s where the beauty of God is most powerfully, potently rooted. And as we navigate the mess that we find in our lives and the chaos of our lives, let our prayer be that we can gaze upon the beauty of God. When we do that, maybe we will get a glimpse of Him in the land of the living. God, we thank You that You are beauty, even though this might be one of those things that some of us would have never thought about in terms of it being an attribute of your character that we need to honor and we need to embrace. God, I pray that we would see You, not just what You do, but who You are and we would worship You for that, that we would seek your face and not just your hand. God, I pray that we would reflect your beauty in the way that we reflect your creativity and the way that we adorn the doctrine of God and the way we allow the fruit of the Spirit to be abundant in our lives; the way we will clothe ourselves in humility and kindness and peace and gentleness. God, I pray this week that we would find opportunities to just enjoy your beauty, to enjoy You for who You are. God for those that need to come to the cross today, I pray that your beauty would draw them and attract them and woo them to You, God, that You would begin to do a beautiful thing in their lives, that You would create goodness and beauty out of chaos and mess. In Jesus’ name, Amen.